Donna DeCesare’s “Unsettled”

“Central America in the nineteen-eighties was my journalism school,” Donna DeCesare told me. DeCesare, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, travelled through El Salvador in 1987, in the midst of the country’s violent civil war, during which many El Salvadorans fled to the United States. Those who left often traded, as DeCesare put it, “one kind of violence for another” as they fell in with local gangs, like La Mara Salvatrucha, in Los Angeles. During the following two decades, DeCesare tracked the back-and-forth of gang violence between Central-American and U.S. communities, and the toll it took on the lives and families of the gang members.

“When I began, I was curious about why Central-American refugee youth were joining gangs in the U.S. I discovered toxic environments in which immigrant and American-born young people alike were being robbed of their childhood innocence through social neglect, intolerance, and stigmatizing stereotypes,” said DeCesare. “When I returned to Central America to document the ways that gang deportees from the U.S. were changing the region, I found that they were also being changed by the impunity and repression they faced.”

DeCesare’s new book, “Unsettled / Desasosiego: Children in a World of Gangs,” part nonfiction history and part memoir, traces how she came to see gangs as both a symptom and a mechanism of emotional trauma. An honest and sobering depiction of gang life, her photographs transcend straightforward documentation, becoming family albums, memorials, and vehicles for social change.